I
t is characteristic of Sr. Teresa Benedicta's devotion to the youth of Ave Maria that she is spending her last week of her five-year assignment to Ave Maria with high school students attending a week-long summer camp in Georgia.
Since coming to Ave Maria in 2009 she has left a lasting mark on scores of students through her teaching at the Rhodora J. Donahue Academy and her leadership of three mission trips to Nicaragua over spring break. (She is pictured with students Louis Raiger and Michaela Cheffers on the 2014 trip)
The Nicaragua trips came about because she thought the youth in town needed an outlet and "a place for them to pour out their hearts," she said in an interview. "They have so much energy, which is hard in a small town in the middle of nowhere. The trips were a life-changing experience for a lot of the teenagers."
Sr. Teresa Benedicta grew up in the Albuquerque, N.M., area and said she "realized in her senior year of high school that I was being called to religious life."
She attended Thomas Aquinas College for a year but found she had a "great desire in my heart" and visited the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist in 1999, just a few years after the order was established.
"Once I met the sisters, I knew this was it," she said.
After completing her undergraduate education at Eastern Michigan University, and earning a masters in philosophy from Catholic University of America, she taught high school in South Carolina for a year before being assigned to Ave Maria.
She has been serving as the local superior for the local convent, a house in the Hampton Village neighborhood that is usually occupied by four or five sisters. Another one of those nuns, Sr. Mary Martha, also has been reassigned to Peoria, Illinois, after a year in Ave Maria.
The example set by Sr. Teresa Benedicta and the other sisters has led to one young woman, Sr. Mary Consolata, the daughter of Robb and Laurie Klucik, to religious life.
When she gets back from her week in Georgia she'll leave almost immediately for her new assignment, where she will live in a convent in Mill Valley, California, over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and teach at nearby Marin Catholic High Schoool.
The new assignment will mean she'll be closer to an ailing grandfather in Sacramento, CA, but she says she won't be forgetting Ave Maria.
"What an incredible joy it's been to be here," she said, "It has helped me fall more in love with Christ, and I learned how to teach. Ave Maria will always be so dear to my heart."
